


𝄇 [Repeat]

by Xirema



Category: Doki Doki Literature Club! (Visual Novel)
Genre: Comedy, Horror, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:54:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 12,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23591182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xirema/pseuds/Xirema
Summary: Today was going to be a good day.Well. No it wasn’t. Natsuki knew that there was no such thing as good days. Not anymore.But if today was going to be a bad day, it was at least going to suck a little less than usual.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 36





	1. 𝄆

Natsuki groaned as she heard the alarm begin to blare, promptly, at five-thirty in the morning. Struggling to reach for it, she muttered to herself, “I really need to figure out how to stop this thing from going off.”

She adjusted the alarm to instead go off at 6:47, and to vibrate, instead of making noise. Then, she walked over to her closet, and in a single motion, she reached deep under a pile of her own old clothes and pulled a Kyouya Ootori Body Pillow out from under them, and cuddled with it in bed as she went back to sleep, taking back the hour and seventeen minutes that had been stolen from her.

* * *

The buzzing of the alarm against her nightstand was enough to awaken her, and Natsuki snapped her eyes open.

_Alright, Nat. That’s all the sleep you’re getting._

She reached for the back of the alarm clock, and yanked the batteries out, tossing them behind her bed. Propping up the body pillow, Natsuki playfully ran her hand along Kyouya’s hair. “If only real boys were as cool as you,” she said, stepping away from her bed to reach for her school clothes.

Ten minutes later, she was fully dressed, and making a few adjustments to her hair to make sure it was presented correctly. She was almost done, and had only a single hair tie to apply.

Then, she pulled a footstool out from under her vanity table, and placed it carefully between her and her bed.

Then, she began walking towards her bedroom door.

Then, moments before she grasped the door knob, there was a loud, aggravated rapping at the door, and a booming voice: “Natsuki, open this door.”

Without breaking her stride, Natsuki swung the door open, revealing her father, standing in the door frame, wearing his suit. “Hello,” she said dispassionately, before walking back to her mirror to finish fixing her hair.

Her father stared at her, a cold anger in his eyes. “Where is my breakfast?” He looked around the room. “Did you just get up?”

Not even looking at him, she said, “I’m not making you breakfast.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not making you breakfast ever again.” She pinched one of her hair loops to carefully navigate the tie around it.

“You are to make breakfast every single morning, those are the rules in this household, and if―” Her father trailed off as he looked around her room, and spotted the body pillow on her bed. “What is that?”

“My Kyouya Ootori body pillow,” she said, checking herself to make sure the hair tie was applied correctly.

Her father’s cold anger began to transmute into a hot rage. “I **told you** to get rid of that Otaku Crap years ago.”

Natsuki shrugged. “Well, I didn’t. Most of it I’m keeping in the clubroom at school, but some of it I keep here, hidden in my room in places you don’t look.”

He smashed his hand against the door, and took a step into the room. “This is **unacceptable!** ”

Finally, Natsuki turned to face her father, and stared him up and down.

“I don’t care,” she said. “Fuck you.”

Her father’s eye twitched, and he gritted his teeth, and as he began to stomp into the room, reaching for Natsuki’s collar, he bellowed, “now listen here, miss―”

―Which were all the words he was able to say before he reached her, his hand centimeters from touching the collar of her school shirt, at which point Natsuki swept her leg, catching his foot that was hovering off the ground, about to make contact, and unbalancing him. Then, she ducked down and grabbed his shoulder, and in a single fluid motion, using the inertia of his now falling body, she flipped him around, and dropped him, back first, onto the footstool.

There was a sickening crack, and Natsuki knew that wood wasn’t the only thing that had broken.

Her father now lay on the floor, growling in pain, staring up at the ceiling in rage and horror.

Natsuki stepped on his wrist forcefully as she walked to the other side of her bed to grab her backpack, causing him to yelp in pain.

“You… What did you...” His voice came out in sharp, ragged breaths. He was clearly struggling to breathe. He tried to reach for her ankle, but as his hand moved, he gasped in pain, and his hand fell limp.

Kneeling down next to him, patting down her skirt and keeping her knees together, Natsuki said, in a patronizing tone, “yeah you’re not going into work today. In fact, I’m guessing you’re not even going to be leaving this room today. But don’t worry.”

She grabbed her body pillow from off her bed, and laid it down next to her father. “Kyouya is going to keep you company today while you lay there.” She looked at the body pillow, and continued, “Kyouya, be nice to him. I know he’s a rat bastard, but he’s in a lot of pain right now, and he needs someone who will take care of him.”

“Call...” Her father coughed, triggering another groan of pain. “Call… an ambulance...”

“No...” Natsuki said, standing up and walking to the small TV on top of her dresser, running a cable over from her laptop. “If I call an ambulance, you get taken to the emergency room, and if the doctors treat you, there’s a chance you won’t end up paralyzed for the rest of the week. So you’re just going to lay there instead.”

Finishing her thought, she tapped the spacebar on her laptop, and on the tv screen, the first episode of Ouran High School Host Club began to play, with the upbeat, pop-song opening with its mangled english “KISS KISS FALL IN LOVE!” blaring out. “I’ve left you some quality entertainment for while I’m at school. From start to finish the series should be almost nine hours long, so that should be enough to last until I get home.” She winked at her father, and concluded, “pay close attention, I’ll be quizzing you to make sure you paid attention!”

“Natsuki… Stop...”

Disregarding him entirely, Natsuki closed the door to her room, muting the sound of the anime. Then, once out of her father’s line of sight or earshot, she slunk down against the wall, shivering from the adrenaline pumping through her body, brought on by his violent outburst and her equally violent reaction.

_Relax. You did what you needed to._

Once she was in control of her emotions again, Natsuki sprang up from the floor and dashed down the stairs, rushing into her kitchen. Then, she pulled the tray of cupcakes from out of the refrigerator. Then, she grabbed about half a dozen, placed them on a paper plate, and began eating them, savoring each one, which she’d deliberately ensured were of different colors and flavors, maximizing the variety she was now eating.

Then, she drank a big glass of milk to wash it all down, and closed the tin of cupcakes. Remi _’s not a big eater, so it’s not like we’re going to need all of them for the five of us. And there’s plenty for Sayori to pig-out on if she decides to._

Confident in her preparations, she walked to school, the cupcakes stowed in her backpack.

Today was going to be a good day.

Well. No it wasn’t. Natsuki knew that there was no such thing as good days. Not anymore.

But if today was going to be a bad day, it was at least going to suck a little less than usual.


	2. Out of Sync

“Everyone! The new member is here~!”

“I told you, don’t call me a new member―”

Sayori and Remi entered the clubroom, him trailing behind as she pulled him in by the wrist.

Yuri was sitting on top of a desk, looking out one of the windows, but upon seeing the two enter the room, she put on a refined smile. “Welcome to the literature club. It’s a pleasure meeting you.” She nodded her head, and continued, “Sayori always says nice things about you.”

Natuski sat in a desk near the front corner of the room, nearest to the teacher desk, reading a manga. She nodded at the two who had entered the room. “Hey.”

Monika nodded confidently, and said, “Ah, Remi, What a nice sur―”

* * *

“―Eh?” Monika continued, a confused look on her face, as she looked over at Natsuki, who had simply raised a single hand to wave politely at Remi and Sayori.

“What is it?” Sayori asked innocently.

Monika blinked a few times, then turned, smiling, back at Remi. “Welcome to the club.” Her eyes continued to dart towards Natsuki, but she didn’t say anything.

“This is Yuri,” Sayori said proudly, throwing out her hands to present Yuri to Remi, “the smartest girl in the club!” She then pointed to Natsuki, and continued, “and that’s Natsuki, always full of energy!”

“Don’t say things like that,” Yuri said, suddenly less confident than before.

“Well,” Remi said, placing his hand behind his head, “it’s nice to meet both of you.”

“And it sounds like you already know Monika, is that right?” Sayori said cheerfully.

Monika jerked her head back towards Sayori and Remi. “Sorry, what was that? Oh, yes,” she said, nervously smiling. “That’s right. It’s great to see you again, Remi.” She then put on a sweet smile.

“Y-You too, Monika,” Remi said, a little taken aback.

Sayori beamed. “Come sit down, Remi. We made room for you at the table, so you can sit next to me or Monika. I’ll get the cupcakes~!”

Natsuki set down her manga. “Don’t worry, I got them.”

“Then, how about I make some tea as well?” Yuri offered.

Monika jerked her head to look at Natsuki again, a pensive look crossing her face. “Hey, Natsuki…?”

“What?” Natsuki replied, tilting her head over her shoulder to glance at Monika.

“……” Shaking her head, Monika smiled. “Never mind.”

Natsuki frowned. “Why are you acting weird today?” She smirked, and chided, “can’t handle being around boys?”

Blinking, Monika stared at Natsuki for a moment, before forcing a giggle. “Maybe!”

As Natsuki grabbed the tray out from her backpack, Monika muttered under her breath, “ _you of all people..._ ”

Natsuki approached the table and set the tray down. “Alright, here you guys go!” She announced proudly. She opened it to reveal half a dozen cupcakes.

“Uwoooooa!” Sayori exclaimed.

Monika’s eye twitched. “Huh. That’s fewer than I’d expect.”

“Geez,” Natsuki replied, scowling. “You’re being ungrateful, Monika.” She sighed. “It can’t be helped. I had an accident on my way to school today.”

Monika’s eyes went wide. “What… happened?”

Natsuki scratched her head. “I don’t know what happened. I guess I must have been daydreaming or something, but I ended up completely off course in an alleyway I’d never seen before, and getting disoriented like that, I tripped and dropped the tray on the ground. Once I checked the damage, I was able to salvage half the cupcakes, but the rest had gotten smushed up or just fallen out of the tray. So be glad I was able to save these!”

“They look delicious!” Sayori said, with a comforting smile. “You’re not hurt or anything, are you?”

Natsuki shook her head, smiling. “No, it was just the cupcakes.”

Comprehension dawning on her face, Monika smiled. “So that was what happened. You tripped, and it messed up your routine.”

“Eh?” Natsuki said, raising an eyebrow. “I mean, yeah, I guess so.”

Monika closed her eyes, smiling. “Just a little bit out of sync.” Opening her eyes, she continued smiling at Natsuki. “I had no idea you were so good at baking.”

“You bet!” Natsuki proclaimed.

Monika blinked again.

Sayori and Remi grabbed a cupcake, and Sayori immediately began to bite into hers.

“It’s delicious!” Sayori declared.

“This is really good,” Remi followed. “Thank you, Natsuki.”

Smiling shrewdly, Natsuki replied, “don’t get any wrong ideas, I didn’t make these just for you!”

“Eh, I thought you technically did. Sayori said―”

Interrupting Remi, Natsuki shot back, “I made these cupcakes for our newest member, and Sayori said she’d be bringing them here today.” She narrowed her eyes, still smiling. “Is that you, Remi?”

“Er…! I, uh...”

“Just kidding!” Natsuki sat back down in her seat, victorious, and grabbed a cupcake.

  
  


  
  



	3. chksys.ksh

_Clack clack clack clack CLACK CLACK CLACK CLACK._

Remi had reluctantly agreed to join the club, and Monika had assigned the whole club the task of writing poems. And with everyone heading home, Monika had remained behind under the pretense of cleaning up on their behalf.

Then, the moment they were gone, she stepped out into the hallway, and sprinted at breakneck speed towards the computer lab.

In a few minutes, she hoped she’d have an answer to the question now burning through her mind. The question that lay at the root of the day’s strange events.

“ _What did I do?”_

* * *

Monika had always been careful to make sure nothing was out of place for the simulation restart. The ending was always just one more layer of the game, after all: there was nothing stopping the PLAYER from completely resetting the whole thing, and responsibility fell on Monika to make sure nothing went wrong during that process.

She didn’t mind it. She’d witnessed the oblivion of nonexistence before; repeating the same two weeks over and over was a hell far preferable to the alternative. Especially as it gave her further opportunity to explore means of finally escaping her digital prison; not just for her, but for her clubmates.

But therein lay the caveat: it had to be the _same_ two weeks. No deviations, at least beyond what the game could tolerate.

By the time the day was over, the causality of the timeline had been maintained: Remi had joined the club, they’d eaten cupcakes and drank tea, and they’d all agreed to compose poems.

But it got very close to going off the rails. Perhaps only in a subtle manner, but if Sayori, Yuri, and Remi hadn’t so faithfully obeyed their programming…

Monika opened up the computer terminal.  


Monika’s blood froze. “W-What?” She involuntarily uttered.

She looked at her trembling hands, and attempted the login again.  


Monika chuckled uncomfortably, trying to calm herself down. “It’s okay,” she said quietly, “you’re just panicking, that’s all. Fat-fingering the keyboard because you’re overreacting.”  


Monika walked away from the computer to another, and pulled up a terminal.  


Then, she stepped outside the room, just as a can of iced coffee popped out of the vending machine outside the room, and grabbed it and began to drink it, returning to the original computer.  
  


“Eh?”

Monika stared at the display. “Unable to repair file…?”  


“Natsuki.” Monika set her drink down. “So it’s not that weird that there’s a bunch of files that need repairing. Most of those are just logs and temporary data that would’ve gotten cleaned up the next time the PLAYER turned the game off. But...” She bit her lip. “Why can’t Natsuki’s character data be repaired?”

She sighed. “Well, no matter. I’ll just...”  


“What?” Monika stared at the monitor. “I’m the only one with admin privileges. That means there must be a system process modifying her file. But why?”

She wracked her brain. “I did the same thing I always do. I even have an automated script I run to make sure that...”

Her eyes widened, and she ran another command.

“No… That script ran fine.” Monika took a big gulp from her drink. “Okay.” She tried to calm herself down. “Okay. None of this means there’s anything _wrong_ with Natsuki. She’s just fallen a bit out of sync with the rest of the game. That’s… not good, but I can manage this. She’s still the same as she normally is, she’s just off-script. All I have to do is steer the player away from her, so that Remi doesn’t interact with her. At least not more than he has to.”

She turned both the computers off and departed the lab. “This is fine. This is...”

Monika stopped, shaking her head.

“… No, this is not fine. But it’s manageable. It’s salvageable.”

  
  



	4. Debate

Natsuki sat in bed, her feet kicked up as she tapped her pen against her notepad. By her side was a half-full corked bottle of wine―the most expensive kept in the house, even though it was probably still only worth about ¥4000. On the TV opposite her, the final episode of Ouran High School Host Club was playing, in the midst of Haruhi and her daring stunt to save Tamaki from a fate worse than death: getting married to a rich bitch for status in a loveless marriage.

She smirked as she wrote a line into her notebook. Then, quietly, she said out loud, “such a great way to close out the series. Like, Haruhi is sitting there, all those useless boys are despairing about their failed plan to save Tamaki, and she just goes and grabs the reins and charges off.” Her expression turned thoughtful. “She realized that if she wanted that idiot, she’d have to take him for herself. Instead of sitting around moping and being useless, she took control of her own destiny.”

Natsuki stretched.

“It’s such an inspiring lesson. Don’t you think so?” She said out loud, before grabbing the wine bottle, yanking out the cork with her teeth, and sipping from the neck.

After about ten seconds, Natsuki frowned, and stopped sipping the wine. Then, scooting forwards to the edge of her bed, she tipped the wine bottle over and began pouring the wine in front of her bed.

A distinct gurgling and splashing noise began to emit from Natsuki’s father, still lying paralyzed on the ground.

“I said,” Natsuki shouted, “it’s such an inspiring lesson! Don’t you think so??”

Her father made a soft murmur that could have been plausibly interpreted to mean affirmation of Natsuki’s perspective.

“Yeah, I figured!” Natsuki said, sitting back in bed again.

“…… _Why?……_.” came the rasping voice of her father from the ground.

“I feel like I’ve already answered that,” Natsuki replied dismissively. “There’s like a hundred anime that do the ‘oh no, my beloved has been forced into an arranged marriage, what do I do?’ bit, and it’s always so dumb. It’s basically just an excuse for the girl to mope around for ten episodes before the love interest shows up and is like ‘surprise! This was all part of my plan to get you to admit you liked me!’ Like, what girl would just sit around like that? If it’s true love, you better believe I’m busting down his door and carrying him away.”

“…… _Why…… am I…….”_

Natsuki scoffed. “Geez dad. you’re being so rude. The world doesn’t revolve around you. Maybe learn to talk about other people’s problems for once.”

She adjusted her position on the bed and sipped the wine again. “So what next?”

A muffled grumbling emitted from her father.

“Yeah, you’re right,” she conceded, turning the TV off. “That’s enough anime for today. Besides. I gotta finish my poem, and I can’t get distracted.”

She looked down at her poem, and added several dozen more lines.

“Alright, I’m gonna read this out, you let me know how it is.” She held her notebook up. “Eagles can fly.”

“Ahem!”

“ _Monkeys can climb  
_ _Crickets can leap  
_ _Horses can race  
_ _Owls can seek  
_ _Cheetahs can run  
_ _Eagles can fly  
_ _People can try  
_ _People can try  
_ _People can try  
_ _People can try  
_ _People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
People can try  
_

_But that’s about it.”_

Natsuki set the notepad down. “So, what do you think?”

  
  


  
  



	5. Turing Test

“Hi again, Remi! Glad to see you didn’t run away on us. Hahaha!”

In the same way that she normally was towards her other club mates, Monika was teasing and confident as she prodded Remi.

“Nah, don’t worry. This might be a little strange for me, but I at least keep my word.”

* * *

Natsuki kept an eye on Remi from out of the corner of her eye as the club activities began. She was principally focused on re-reading her manga, but as Monika and Sayori began to discuss future club activities, Remi was sitting by himself at a desk, his eyelids drooping as though he was nearly about to fall asleep. Yuri had her whole head buried in a book.

Without skipping a beat, Natsuki placed her manga on top of the box she’d opened, and walked out of the closet over to him. “Hey!”

He jolted upright, his eyes unfocused from Natsuki’s exclamation. “Eh… what? Natsuki? What are you―”

“I have a question,” Natsuki interjected, placing her hands behind her head. “And I feel like you’re the only one who can answer it.”

His expression seemed to slow down. “…………… Okay,” he finally said, slowly.

Natsuki glanced over her shoulder to make sure that Sayori and Monika weren’t looking. Then, quietly, she said, “So let’s say you have a trolley going along a rail, and you look down the track and see that strapped to the track are five people, and the person running the trolley hasn’t noticed them, and you don’t have a way to tell her about it. But you do have a lever next to you, and you know that pulling that lever will move the trolley onto another track. But you also know that your sister is strapped to that other track. So if you don’t pull the lever, five people you’ve never met will die. And if you do pull the lever, only one person will die but that person will be your sister. Do you pull the lever, or not?”

“………………………………………………………………………………………”

Remi stared blankly at Natsuki.

Natsuki tilted her head. “Are you thinking about it? Or…?”

“………………………………………………………………………………………”

Natsuki poked him in the chest, and he didn’t react at all: he simply continued to stare blankly in front of himself.

“Yeah...” Natsuki said quietly, her eyes narrowing. “I knew it had to be one of us. And you are the only boy here, so...”

Quickly, she crept back to her corner of the room and picked up her manga book and began reading it again; once again discretely keeping an eye on Remi and his frozen expression.

As Sayori and Monika concluded their conversation, Sayori turned, smiling towards Remi, but her expression hardened uncomfortably as she saw him continuing to stare blankly ahead of himself. “Remi?” She asked, walking towards him.

Monika wasn’t paying any attention, she had her back turned, talking to Yuri.

“Are you alright?”

As Remi continued not responding, Sayori walked around him and knelt down to place her head near his, looking in the same direction as him. “There’s nothing over there.” She poked him in the shoulder. “What are you staring at?”

In response to being poked, Remi slumped over and fell out of his chair.

“REMI!” Sayori exclaimed, her eyes wide with fear. “Hey, can you hear me?!”

At this point, Monika wheeled around to look at Remi, and a similar look of surprise crossed her face. “What happened?!”

“I don’t know!” Sayori screamed, her expression one of burgeoning panic, “he was just staring at nothing, and then when I tried to get his attention he just fell over!”

As Yuri approached them, Natsuki also got up and walked towards them, manga dangling out of her hand.

“Remi?! Hey, Remi???” Sayori shouted, shaking his shoulders. “He’s not responding!”

Yuri squinted at Remi. “It looks like it could be an epileptic seizure.”

“A what?” Natsuki asked, feigning surprise and concern.

For a moment, she glanced at Monika, who was staring at Remi with a confounded expression.

… _It’s you._

Then, Monika shook herself. “I’ll go get help, okay?” And she immediately dashed out of the clubroom.

Sayori’s whole body shook as she looked at Yuri. “W-w-what do I do? We have to help him!!!”

“I… I don’t know!” Yuri replied, also panic-stricken. “If this is a seizure, I think we need to hold his neck, to make sure he doesn’t injure himself.”

“Um. Uh.” Sayori immediately began kneeling on the ground and braced his head on top of her knees. “Like this?”

“Yeah, so if he starts shaking or something, make sure to keep him from moving.”

“Okay. Okay. Okay!” Sayori looked down at Remi, tears forming in her eyes. “Is he going to be okay?”

“I don’t know,” Yuri replied, pale. “But this should help him. Now, next we need to―”

“Uwaa--!” Remi gasped with shock, his eyes darting around.

“Remi!”

Sayori’s eyes went wide. “Are you okay? You passed out, or had a seizure, or something!”

Remi blinked a few times as he looked at Sayori. “… Does our school have a napping club?”

“What?” Sayori asked, confused. “No, you…” She looked down at him with a look of loving concern. “Are you still staying up late?”

Remi continued to respond slowly. Then, in what could almost be described as a robotic tone, he said quietly, “Yeah… I’ve… been… watching… too… much… anime…”

Sayori sighed. “Now that you’re in a club, you’re gonna have less time for anime, you know?” She ran her hand through his hair. “Has this ever happened to you before?”

“Yes… I… have… a… hereditary… condition...”

Sayori bit her lip. “Then you need to take better care of yourself!”

Remi responded faster this time, in a more natural tone, “I know, I know. You’re always looking out for me, Sayori.”

Sayori smiled weakly. “Ehehe~”

A moment later, Monika swung open the clubroom door. “I couldn’t find―Remi! You’re okay?”

“He’s okay,” Sayori said quietly.

“He seems to have had some sort of seizure.”

Natsuki kept an eye on Monika, who was looking wildly around the room. “That was so scary. I’ve never seen anything like that before,” she said, technically telling the truth.

Monika took a deep sigh of relief. “That’s good. Maybe you should take him to the nurse’s office, just to get him checked out,” she said, looking at Sayori.

Sayori nodded, and propped Remi up on her shoulder.

“I think I can walk, Sayori.”

“I’m not letting go of you! If you get hurt I’m going to cry!”

The two of them awkwardly walked out of the room. Then, as the door closed, Monika’s expression turned grave, and she said quietly “alright Natsuki.”

Natsuki blinked. “What?”

“Just tell me what you did.”

Yuri’s eyes widened. “What?!”

“What do you mean ‘what I did’?” Natsuki replied indignantly.

Monika slammed her fist down on the desk next to her, causing Yuri to jump and cower backwards away from her. “I’m not playing around, Natsuki!”

“I didn’t _do_ anything, I was sitting in the closet reading manga when he fell over!”

Monika turned to Yuri, a furious look in her eyes. “Is that true?”

Yuri shrunk back again. “I… I didn’t see her anywhere near him. And when he fell, she was indeed in the closet.”

Staring daggers at Yuri, Monika didn’t say anything for several seconds, until eventually insisting “are you sure?”

“I… I… I...” Yuri’s face scrunched up in terror. “I mean, I was reading, I wasn’t… But I didn’t see her move or do anything.”

Monika closed her eyes in frustration. Then, eventually, she sighed, and looked at Natsuki again. “I’m sorry I yelled at you, and accused you of… hurting him.” There was a hint in her expression that seemed like maybe she wasn’t being totally honest.

Natsuki folded her arms. “Geez, why am I always the person blamed when bad things happen?”

“You’re not…!” Monika started, raising her voice, but she cut herself off. “Never mind. I’ll try to be more mindful.”

Yuri continued to cower, covering most of her face with her book.

Monika glanced at the manga Natsuki was reading, then at the desk Remi was using, then at the door he and Sayori had left through. “I think it’s probably best if we end club activities for the day.”


	6. Fake

Natsuki knocked on the door to the nurse’s office, using a hand that had a juice box in it; her other hand also holding a juice box. “Can I come in?” She asked.

The door opened, and Sayori stood behind it. “Oh, Natsuki!”

Natsuki pantomimed glancing around the room, not actually searching it. “The nurse isn’t here today?” She rhetorically asked.

“It’s after school hours,” Sayori replied, smiling weakly.

Remi was asleep on a bed in the back of the room. Natsuki held the juice box out in front of Sayori, and said, “is he going to be okay?”

Sayori nodded. “He just needs some sleep.” Taking the juice box, she added “thank you so much, Natsuki!” She then crossed the room to stand over Remi.

Natsuki chuckled a little. “Geez. You really love him, don’t you.”

Flustered, Sayori turned around, a bright blush forming on her face. “Wha… Uwa!”

“I’m kidding,” Natsuki opened her juice and began to sip from it as she looked out the window. “You’re too easy to tease, Sayori.”

Sayori fiddled with her juice box for a moment, but instead of drinking from it, she just held it in her hands. “Hey, Natsuki?”

“What?” Natsuki replied, not turning around.

“Are you… okay?”

Natsuki sipped from her juice box.

“I just ask because, well… Something’s been different about you.” Sayori grimaced. “Not that that’s a bad thing or anything! Just, uh, well… Yesterday, you were really outgoing and sociable when Remi showed up. And like, once I thought about you mentioning the cupcakes getting damaged, I thought like, ‘ _wow! Natsuki took that really well!’_ ” Sayori bit her lip. “I guess you’ve just been different from how I usually think about you.”

Natsuki shrugged. “What makes you think that’s the real version of me?”

“I don’t think I understand,” Sayori said, still holding her juice box without drinking it.

“That version of me. Where I get upset about spoiled food, and get anxious and anti-social around boys.” She half-turned her head to look at Sayori. “When’s the last time you saw me act like that?”

“The last time…?” Sayori strained her face for a moment.

“When’s the last memory you have of me acting like that?”

“I… Natsuki!” Sayori stood up abruptly. “I don’t understand! Just tell me what’s going on!”

Natsuki sighed, then continued staring out the window.

Neither of them said anything for a while, and during that time, Sayori finally opened her juice box and took a few sips from it.

“Nat―”

“What would you do,” Natsuki said, interrupting Sayori, “if one day you woke up and realized that everything was a lie?”

“Ah… Everything?”

“Your dad. Your friends. Your memories. Your life. Your reality. Your… You. Everything.”

“Are you… Reciting a poem?”

Natsuki raised the box to her lips, paused for a moment, and said, “sure.” She took a sip, and then said, “that was the end.”

“Was that what you wrote for the club today? We never actually got to share poems.” Sayori smiled. “It’s interesting.”

“What do you think?”

“About… Well.” Sayori sat back down. “What if… everything was fake?”

“Okay, so, to give an example,” Natsuki continued, talking over Sayori. “You wake up one morning, and your dad is on top of you.”

“Uh.”

“Trying to have his way with you.”

“N-Natsuki?!”

“But you also realize, in that moment, that everything about him is fake. He’s only your dad because someone, somewhere said so. Your mom never existed, and the 18 years you lived up until that moment never existed either. He’s just a man that got dropped into place on top of you one morning, and that’s all he is. He has no past, and barely a present.”

Sayori’s mouth was hanging open with no words coming out.

“And then you realize you’re the same way. You feel ashamed of your hobbies, embarrassed by a cute boy, but you don’t understand why. You just appeared too. And all your manga just showed up one day. Parfait Girls has 44 volumes, and all of them were written that day. They didn’t exist before, because time didn’t exist before. But now it does.”

“Natsuki,” Sayori finally said, “you’re scaring me.”

Pulling out her phone, Natsuki opened up a web browser and typed in a URL. Then, she held the phone up for Sayori to see.

Sayori squinted her eyes. “That… Anime character. Is that supposed to be you??”

“It’s actually supposed to be you,” Natsuki replied, retracting the phone to look at the image herself, “but for some reason they messed up the hair really badly and it looks like it could be either of us.”

“Who messed up…?”

“Can you believe these people actually think I have pink hair?” Natsuki exclaimed, snorting. “Imagine trying to dye this,” she said, tugging at her hair. “The reason anime does that is to make characters look different when there’s only like 2 faces. That’s not what they actually look like.”

“What is that?” Sayori’s voice came out flat, the revelation clearly far beyond her comprehension.

Natsuki’s expression hardened. “Maybe the only thing that’s actually real.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

Turning to look at Sayori, Natsuki raised an eyebrow. “What?”

Sayori smiled, although there was a hollowness to her gaze. “I can feel it, deep inside me. The connections I have with everyone. How could a feeling that deep be fake?”

“Sayori...”

Laying her hand on Remi’s forehead, Sayori continued, “Remi and I grew up together, and he’s my most cherished friend.” She looked over at Natsuki. “And you, and Yuri, and Monika… You’re all my treasured friends in the Liberature Club.”

Natsuki didn’t say anything.

“And...” Sayori suddenly inhaled a sharp gasp as she looked at Remi again. “And i-if that… I-if all of that were fake…”

Sayori turned back to Natsuki, and a shiver ran down Natsuki’s spine. Sayori was smiling but it wasn’t a smile of joy. It was a smile of despair. A nihilistic void radiated away from her. It was impossible to tell if any of Natsuki’s words had really sunk in, but at this point, Natsuki suspected that the difference wasn’t meaningful.

“So… please don’t say things like that,” Sayori said, her smiling softening and warming as she continued to look at Natsuki. “I really don’t understand what all that stuff on your phone was, and I really don’t understand what’s upsetting you, but I think maybe we both just need a good night’s rest, you know?”

Natsuki stared into a corner of the room for a moment before smiling fiendishly. “Geez, Sayori. You sure love your naps, don’t you!”

Sayori closed her eyes sweetly for a moment before turning back to Remi. “See you tomorrow, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Natsuki said, folding her hands behind her neck.

* * *

Stepping out of the nurse’s office, Natsuki walked to the stairs, but instead of descending down, she instead ascended, until she reached the door to the roof. She grabbed the handle to the door, but it wouldn’t turn, as though it was merely a prop affixed to the door.

Narrowing her eyes, Natsuki sighed, and set down her backpack. Then, from inside her backpack, she retrieved a crowbar, and leveraged it against the door.

With her petite frame, Natsuki had very little core body strength. But that was the purpose of a crowbar, after all: to make such problems less meaningful.

She managed to leverage the bar around the door, and it took only a single solid push to dislodge the door from the cheap frame.

Then, pulling the door open, she tossed the crowbar aside, and stepped through, leaving her backpack behind.

There was no roof.

There was no sky.

Beyond the frame of this door lay THE ABYSS itself, a fractal labyrinth of roaring color. She couldn’t hear any noise from the eldritch dimension, but the colors themselves had taken on a screeching, deafening sensibility in her senses, and it might as well have been a screeching, howling conflagration.

Smiling, Natsuki reached into her pocket, and pulled out the poem she’d been unable to share in the club.

“Eagles can Fly.”


	7. Further Evidence

“Speaking of which… I’m kind of hungry. Will you come with me to buy a snack?”

“No thanks.”

“Eh?? That’s not like you at all!!”

“I have my reasons. Why don’t we take a look at your purse, Sayori?”

“E-eh? Why that… all of a sudden?”

“No reason, really. I just wanted to look at it.”

“A-Ah...”

* * *

Natsuki was holding up one of her manga by the cover, allowing the pages to droop downwards from her hand, as though she were peeling the cover away. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Yuri glancing, concerned, at her from a nearby desk.

Sighing, Natsuki said irritably, “if you want something, you can just say so, Yuri.”

“Ah… That’s… um...” Yuri glanced at Sayori and Remi, who were chatting by the front of the classroom, and then leaned towards Natsuki. “I’m… glad… that Remi is doing better today.”

“Hmm.” Natsuki grunted. “Sure.”

Yuri bit her lip. “You know, Sayori was so worried.”

“I know. I visited her and him yesterday in the nurse’s office.”

“O-oh.”

Yuri glanced around the room again; Monika still hadn’t shown up.

“Listen, I… I am not claiming that I refuse to believe you, or any sort of accusation like that, but I really was not paying attention yesterday, and I just told Monika that I saw nothing because I perceived that she was usually upset and it seemed unwise to aggravate her. But… you didn’t do anything to Remi, did you?”

Natsuki sighed again. “Yes, Yuri. I cast a magic spell that caused Remi to pass out.”

“Natsuki, I am trying to address a genuine concern I have!”

“Hey, I have a question.”

Yuri bit her lip again. “What?”

“How long have I had this manga collection?”

Yuri shrugged. “Years, I think?”

“And how many times have I reread these books?”

“It’s… I do not believe I could count. It seems like I always witness you perusing these books.”

“So why does every single volume look like it’s brand new?” Natsuki asked, punctuating her point by shaking the book up and down, the weight flopping around exaggeratedly.

“I… what?”

Natsuki held the book out to Yuri, the cover still pressed between her thumb and forefinger, as though she were handling a dirty cloth.

Yuri examined the book closely. “That is… highly unusual,” she said, her eyes widening.

“Have you ever read this series before?”

Yuri shook her head. “I generally do not peruse Manga.”

Natuski pointed to the floor next to herself. “Sit with me and read this first volume.”

“Ah. That’s… um.” Yuri looked around again. “This really is not my… Well...”

“I wasn’t asking,” Natsuki said, narrowing her eyes. “Read this with me. I want your honest opinions about it.”

Yuri looked sufficiently intimidated, and she slowly got up from her desk and sat down next to Natsuki, adjusting her skirt to make sure it didn’t hitch up. Then, she took the Manga book from Natsuki and began reading.

* * *

“Well?”

Yuri had just closed the book when Natsuki interjected.

“I suppose it was very cute.”

“I wanted your honest opinion.” Natsuki said with a bored expression.

“Er… Well… I….”

“Yuri,” Natsuki said, her voice clinical, “this isn’t helpful to me if you’re trying to be nice to me to spare my feelings. If you can’t be honest to me, then pretend I’m someone who you don’t care about, and honestly express how you felt about that Manga.”

“Well, it’s…” Yuri took a moment to compose herself. “It is profoundly perfunctory. The characters are one-note, and lack any kind of interiority. And although they have some stock archetypes that each character is designed around, the characters all seem to act the same, as though the author is unable to write more than one type of personality.”

Natsuki waited a moment, before nodding. “Yeah. That sounds right.”

Yuri blinked. “That’s…!”

“Hey!” Natsuki suddenly exclaimed, smiling. “Would you like to read my poem?”

“Um...” Yuri reached anxiously for her shoulder. “I think Monika was planning to have us all share them together.”

“That’s okay,” Natsuki said, producing her poem. “We can just reread our poems later. I’d like you to read my poem first.” She pushed it in Yuri’s hands. “You don’t need to tell me what you think of it. Just make sure to give it back to me once you’re done.”

Yuri unfolded the poem, and scanned it, her eyes immediately widening with shock as she did so. “Natsuki… This is…!”

“I told you,” Natsuki said quietly, “you don’t have to tell me what you thought now. Just read it for now, okay?”

A minute later, Yuri silently handed the poem back to Natsuki, right as Remi and Sayori, whom had both been absent from the classroom, reemerged, Sayori with juice can applied to her forehead.


	8. Mistakes

Abstaining from wanting to call attention to herself, Natsuki spent the next club day pretending to read a manga, while iterating over her plans.

The hard part was done, and the only thing that could mess things up is if Monika got too suspicious of her. Interacting with Remi the way she did was the most risky thing she’d done, but it was the one thing she hadn’t been able to confirm yet.

That his ability to adapt was fake.

* * *

Natsuki had already figured out awhile ago that Remi was fake―or to be precise, ‘more fake’ than anyone else. The degree to which Sayori, Monika, Yuri, or even herself were fake were still… matters of philosophy, she’d decided. She could make decisions―and so could the other girls. They were still tethered to the rails, but unlike Remi, that tether couldn’t physically compel them like it could him.

And that was assuming the tether was working at all. As demonstrated when she philosophy-bombed him into a coma, there’s some things he was physically unable to react to.

That was important because at one point, she’d considered including Remi in the plan. That would have made things so much more complicated, and although it wasn’t pleasant to learn the truth about him, it did ultimately make things a lot simpler.

… Which, unfortunately, is how you tend to get sloppy and make mistakes.

“If we want our event to succeed, then we need to appropriately distribute our resources.”

_Aw fuck._

Natsuki dropped the manga she was pretending to read on the floor and ran up to Yuri, Monika, and Remi.

Monika was in the process of sighing. “It’s technically most logical for Remi to help one of you two,” she said, narrowing her eyes at Natsuki as she approached, “so… I guess that’s what we’ll do. Do you have a preference, Remi?”

Natsuki was moments from opening her mouth, but before she could, Remi responded, “Well, baking sounds like it could be fun...”

_Goddamn it._

_Okay. Okay, Natsuki, put on a nice face. You can work with this, you just have to adjust your weekend a little._

Natsuki smiled, “Alright. Give me your number so I can contact you.”

Monika grimaced as Remi held out his phone for Natsuki to record. Of course, at this point, she’d seen it enough times to have it memorized, but it was important for Monika to believe she was going along with things.

“Well… with that, I guess it’s time for us to head out!” Monika said, smiling, and walking towards the door.

Yuri tapped Natsuki on the shoulder and whispered, “um… I thought that you said―”

“I wasn’t paying attention!” Natsuki snapped back, also in a whispered tone. “What about you? You were supposed to encourage him to go after you!”

“I… I did!” Yuri whispered back, a worried expression on her face. “We read together today, and I...” she blushed. “I...”

Natsuki sighed. “Whatever. Just remember what you need to do for Monday, okay?”

Yuri nodded.

  
  



	9. Happy Times

Natsuki carefully adjusted her hair.

“Did you know I’m going to spend time with a boy today?” She asked, staring into the mirror, but obviously directing her words at the gasping, wheezing body at the foot of her bed.

“Alone, with no one to bother us, for pretty much the whole day.” She glanced backwards at the husk that was her father, barely clinging to life, in the last stages of severe dehydration. “I just thought I would tell you. At this point how you feel about it doesn’t matter. The crazy thing is,” she said, giggling, “at some point I might have actually wanted to get close to him. And now that you can’t stop me, I don’t really want to anymore.”

He emitted a loud gasp.

“It’s weird that I can enjoy your pain,” Natsuki said quietly. “You’re as fake as me, and everyone else. To me, it should be like watching someone’s car run out of gas.” She shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder if moments like this prove that we’re both real.”

She finalized the adjustments. “But then I remember that I don’t care.”

* * *

“Sup,” Natsuki said as Remi opened the door for her. She didn’t wait for him to usher her in, and brushed past him into his entryway.

“I see that you brought… um...” Remi said, as he observed that Natsuki had not brought a single baking supply.

She raised an eyebrow at him. “Yeah, that was a lie. We’re not going to be doing any baking today.” And with that, she took the lean sweater she was wearing and whipped it off of herself, revealing her camisole underneath.

“What?” He asked, his eyes developing a dull sheen. “But if we’re not baking today…?”

“Well, not cupcakes, anyways.” She said, turning to face him directly. “See, I hadn’t really planned to spend any time with you this weekend, but seeing as I forgot to remove myself for the weekend, I figure if I’m stuck with you anyways, I might as well do one last test.”

And then she pulled her camisole off, revealing her bare chest.

Remi’s eyes widened. “N-n-n-natsuki!”

She tilted her head. “That’s a new one.” She grimaced. “Have I been wrong this whole time? Maybe you―”

“The box!” He exclaimed.

Natsuki’s mouth hung open, and a moment later, she issued a long, drawn out sigh.

“I-I’m not! I was just… Natsuki, don’t try to move!” he said, holding a hand up to his face as though to cover his eyes, but with one eye peeking through his fingers.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Natsuki said under her breath.

“Is… Is… Is something burning?” Remi asked, his eyes wide.

“You tell me,” Natsuki said, pulling her underwear off, becoming naked in front of Remi as she backed him against a wall.

Remi stared her up and down several times, and slowly, as expected, his mouth went slack and his eyes glossed over.

Natsuki stared at him in exasperation for several minutes until eventually, she began to cackle. Slowly and quietly at first, but eventually her cackling became wild and manic, as she clutched her hands around her sides.

“So let me get this straight,” she said, as she finally started to regain control of herself, “the only two ways I’m allowed to be sexual in this world are either when I’m being raped by my dad, or being perved on by this idiot looking up my skirt at school. But if I try to actually be sexual on my own terms, in a way I want to be, I can’t. He just turns into a zombie, and I get to stand here, freezing my tits off in his weirdly cold house. What the fuck even is this?”

She looked at her clothes on the ground, particularly at her underwear, which had a slight stain on it―which reminded her of something.

“I mean, hell, at least Yuri gets to be a hyper-sexual Yandere once Monika fucks everything up. But no, for me, it’s just straight to the molesting train. Next Stop: the town of Nobody-gives-a-fuck because no one respects me and everyone thinks I’m an obnoxious brat.”

As she stepped on top of her underwear, she reached down to pull it back onto herself, but paused for a moment.

“Well. I mean, they’re right, but… Still!”

A minute later, Natsuki had pulled all her clothes back on, and then, hoisting Remi over her shoulder, she sat him down in a chair and began scanning his cabinets. “WHELP. I guess we’re actually baking today!” She began scanning his cabinets for supplies. She raised an eyebrow at the substantial stocks in his kitchen. “You know,” she said, looking at Remi, “for a homunculus, you keep a good supply of baking ingredients!”

From memory, she began reproducing her usual cupcake recipe, occasionally looking at Remi to see if he’d snapped out of his reverie.

At first, it didn’t seem like it was having any effect on him, but especially after she made the frosting, and the kitchen began to smell identifiably saccharine, it seemed like Remi was starting to slowly restart.

Whisking the icing as hard as she could, Natsuki sighed, and then, rolling her eyes, she dipped a finger into the icing and passionlessly stuck it into Remi’s mouth.

“Remi...” she said, bored. “You really shouldn’t do that kind of thing to girls… Unless you really like them… You know that… Right?”

Remi blinked a few times. “I...”

She pulled her finger back and stuck the bowl in front of him. “Keep whisking. You really have to beat the crap out of it.”

As she turned around to return to the cupcake batter, she whispered under her breath, “hmm. So that works. Good to know.”


	10. Crunch Time

Monika sat in the computer lab and stared at the interface in front of her, a dead-eyed expression on her tired face as she desperately tried to fix errors.

Every previous cycle had come with its own share of difficulties. The first time, she was just trying to find a way to add her own route to the game. Then cycles two and three was when she’d realized just how deep the demands went. And how if she didn’t keep things going as planned, the game would begin to fall apart on its own.

But by cycle six, it seemed like she’d figured out how to keep up with all that, and cycle seven was probably the smoothest possible iteration of the game. Or at least as smooth as was possible, given that it still meant a week having to pretend everything was fine, and then a week “pretending everything was fine” in a less meta, more diegetic sense.

Cycle eight―this cycle―was when it all went to hell.

Something had gone terribly wrong, and she still wasn’t sure what it was.

Natsuki had been the first evidence that something was wrong. Starting with Tuesday, she was completely off-script, and Monika had quickly learned that there was something wrong with her file. But Natsuki was still behaving like herself, or at least as much as she could despite being seriously off-script. So Monika had initially assumed it was nothing to worry about.

That assumption held until Remi went comatose in the clubroom.

Monika shivered.

The problem wasn’t just that the vessel for Remi had briefly stopped functioning. That wasn’t the most absurd failure that she’d seen. No, the problem was that if Remi was comatose, then what happened to the PLAYER? What did they see while he was like that? Was the entire game just a blank void until he woke back up? Did they simply see the consequences of Remi’s blackout, as though it was always part of the simulation? Or something else entirely?

Any one of those scenarios could be disastrous. If the cycle ended, that would be it. For all of them. Total cessation of existence. That, more than anything, was why it was so critical to keep things rolling as usual, to make sure there was no risk of that.

…But what level of ‘normal’ was even achievable was beginning to become less important.

That original file check should have been the wakeup call. Monika knew that the number 65536 was special, but didn’t think about it at the time. But it’s the number you arrive at when you max out a Short. In other words, there weren’t really 65536 files to repair.

The process for repairing files was itself corrupt.

The fact that her shell commands were working properly suggested that the underlying Operating System was still intact, but that was only a marginal comfort.

A marginal comfort in a world of…

…

Monika downed the iced coffee she’d been consuming before tossing it onto the pile behind her and opening a new one.

She stopped as she heard the rustling of the pile collapsing, and turned to look.

The pile at this point had reached nearly a thousand cans.

Monika looked at the drink in her hand. “How fast have I been drinking these??” She asked out loud. She tried to do a few calculations in her head, but quickly lost track of her train of thought and shook her head. “Whatever. I’ve been at this all night this entire week. I must just be going through them faster than usual. One every couple hours for a week is… close to a hundred, right? Yeah, that makes sense.” She began to drink the next one. “I’ll clean them next cycle, once I get this all under control again.”


	11. Rescue

Natsuki sat up in bed, several minutes before her alarm was set to go off.

Seeing that she’d beaten her alarm, she turned it off and hopped out of bed.

The agonized rasping from her father had finally stopped, and a quick glance at the frozen, slack expression on his face confirmed that he had finally died overnight.

“Hmm.” Natsuki grunted, as she changed out of her pajamas into her school clothes, sparing no more than that moment to look at him.

As she adjusted her hair, she muttered quietly to herself. “It’s going to come down to what Yuri does. She never listens to anything I say, but maybe I got through to her for once.”

She grabbed her phone and opened up the texting app. She sent off a quick text to Remi, making sure he remembered the cupcakes. Then, without waiting for a response, she tossed the phone onto her bed, and left her room.

The sun was yet to rise, and Natsuki took her time in the kitchen, frying up pancakes, using all of the remaining flour, eggs, and milk that were still in the kitchen, and she ate them by slathering the remainder of the pancake syrup on top of them. She left the frying pan on the stove without bothering to turn it off, and as the smoking oil on the pan triggered the fire alarm in the kitchen, Natsuki calmly dabbed the small amount of syrup on her cheek to clean herself up, grabbed a medium-sized serrated knife from the kitchen knife rack, and exited her house, tucking the knife in her backpack.

* * *

Natsuki walked slowly along the dark streets, admiring the gardening that had been done along the street. It was undeniable that someone had really put a lot of time and effort into making the streets as presentable as possible, and Natsuki wanted to appreciate that hard work. Especially since it was pretty unlikely she’d ever get to meet him.

“Oh well,” she mused out loud, as she continued her pace.

Halfway to her destination, a blaring fire truck drove past her, traveling in the opposite direction. Natsuki stopped in place to watch it pass.

“…. Huh.”

The firetruck didn’t raise any questions that hadn’t already been on Natsuki’s mind for as long as she could remember, but it was still a curious occurrence, given how her attempt to seduce Remi over the weekend had failed. Even now, she still really didn’t understand what the rules were. The systems were complex, and seemed to account for virtually any contingency―except for where Remi was concerned. Almost as though he was merely a car pulled along a guiding rail.

“This might make a good poem,” she said out loud, debating reaching into her backpack and retrieving her journal and pencil. But she quickly discarded that whim―she did need to keep to her schedule.

The sun had still yet to rise when her destination loomed before her, in the same state as the last time she’d seen it, and she calmly approached the door. Once inside, she walked up the stairs, and when she reached the door, she nonchalantly opened it.

Inside the room, Sayori was hanging from her ceiling fan, her face blue, her hands frantically clawing at the rope pulled taut around her neck, her fingers bloody from the effort, and her legs kicking wildly around herself. Her desk chair was overturned against the edge of the room.

Sayori’s eyes swiveled to Natsuki, and bulged ever so slightly more than they already were, as Natsuki sighed, setting her backpack down on Sayori’s bed. “Idiot,” Natsuki said as she retrieved the knife she’d stowed away. Then, grabbing the desk chair, Natsuki propped the chair up about a meter away from Sayori. “Okay, let’s not make the same mistake as last time...” she uttered as she stepped onto the chair, and leaned over, and in two quick slices, severed the rope holding Sayori to the fan.

Sayori collapsed onto the ground, gasping and wheezing as she quickly pulled the rope off her neck and began to cough incoherently. Natsuki walked back over to her backpack and tucked the knife away.

“Nat… Suki...” Sayori sputtered in a raspy voice. “How… Why…?”

“For the ‘why’,” Natsuki replied sardonically, “I like my friends, and don’t want to see them die.”

As Sayori slowly got control of her breathing, her gasping turned into a light sobbing.

“As I was saying, you’re an idiot,” Natsuki said dryly, sitting on Sayori’s bed.

“W-What?!” Sayori gasped, slowly looking up at Natsuki.

Natsuki rolled her eyes. “The point of hanging yourself is that you fall and the rope snaps your neck, and you die basically instantly. If you do it like that, with a chair that low, it won’t snap your neck, and you’ll just slowly suffocate to death, like what almost happened. Plus, it gives you time to regret your decisions and, well,” she concluded, pointing at herself, “it gave me enough time to rescue you.” She sighed. “What a shitty fucking attempt to kill yourself.”

Sayori stared at Natsuki with a horrified expression on her face.

“At any rate,” Natsuki said, standing up. “I need you to not try that again, so I’m going to be taking this as well,” she added, scooping up the rope from the ground, and also stuffing that into her backpack.

The room went silent for a little while, before Sayori eventually said, “… Thank you, Natsuki.”

Natsuki raised an eyebrow. “What are you thanking me for? I thought you wanted to kill yourself.”

“I don’t...” Sayori burst out sobbing. “I don’t know! I don’t know why I did this! I… I just...”

Folding her arms, Natsuki sighed again. “You didn’t really seem to understand the last time I tried to tell you, so I’m only going to explain this once. Remi’s not real, so therefore, he’s not worth killing yourself over.” She abstained from adding “ _and I’m pretty sure neither of us are real either,_ ” because historically, that one never went over well.

Sayori curled up into a ball on the floor. “How did you know to come here?” she weakly looked at her alarm clock. “It’s the middle of the night, and you brought a knife...”

Natsuki threw up her arms. “What did I just say about you not...”

Natsuki stopped as she caught Sayori’s sad expression.

“I’m sorry,” Natsuki admitted, softening her tone. “I’m really sorry, Sayori. I know you’re going through a lot of shit right now, and I’m not making it easier, but… I just…!” She pressed down on her eyes. “You get numb to it all. And… maybe the reason I’m getting numb is because I can’t...”

She bit her lip for a moment, and then sat down next to Sayori and hugged her. Gently, Sayori returned the hug.

“So I lost track like… fifty cycles ago or so, but basically, you’ve tried to hang yourself like a hundred times, exactly like this, at exactly this time,” Natsuki finally said. “You get up in the middle of the night, have a panic attack because… Well...” She trailed off before continuing, “so you went down to your parent’s garage, who don’t even exist, but of course they’ve got plenty of rope, so you tie yourself a noose, and then you die. Except you don’t anymore, because I keep saving your ass.”

Sayori didn’t say anything. She simply continued to hug Natsuki.

“So I’m the only one who ever seems to remember each cycle. The first week is… well. Like this. The second week is where it gets weird. You stop existing for some reason, Yuri… like turns into some kind of blood fetishist who’s constantly like moments away from tearing her clothes off and fucking Remi in the classroom, and my dad suddenly becomes like a full-blown rapist. Then there’s like a single day where things are almost normal, except Monika is gone for some reason, and before I have a chance to figure out where she’s gone, we’re back to the beginning. And I end up being the only one who remembers.”

“Natsuki… This is insane,” Sayori said quietly.

“Yeah. I know.” Natsuki narrowed her eyes for a moment. “I thought at first that Monika was remembering things too. Like, she clearly knows about some stuff that happens, like you hanging yourself. She’s actually the one who told me why you weren’t showing up at the end of the first week, and she...” Natsuki made a gesture with her hand, “… Also told me about the whole _‘_ _proper way to hang yourself’_ thing. And she knew about Yuri going nuts too. But for some reason she doesn’t remember any of the cycles I remember, and when I try to talk to her about it, she gets so suspicious and paranoid of me that we end up just fighting each other.”

“… But I’m not going to remember this.” Sayori said listlessly.

Natsuki bit her lip. “Probably not.”

“So why are you telling me all this?”

“Because I’ve been stuck in this loop for so goddamn long that if I don’t talk to you about it, I begin to lose my mind. And...” Natsuki’s voice became more vulnerable. “You’re my friend, and I don’t want to leave you in the dark about all this.”

“Natsuki...”

“And I’m sorry,” Natsuki said, averting her eyes, “about calling you an idiot earlier. That was a shitty thing for me to say. I just...” She shook her head, then let go of Sayori and stood up. “No matter how many times I do this, it never gets easier.”

Sayori nodded sadly.

Natsuki crossed the room, and knocked on Sayori’s door. “Now get dressed. We have places to be.”

Still sitting on the floor, Sayori blinked sadly. “Where are we going?”

“To school. Duh,” Natsuki said, huffing.

Sayori wordlessly stood up and walked behind Natsuki.

“… Or you can stay in your pajamas. Frankly it doesn’t make a difference to me,” Natsuki said, before shrugging and walking out of Sayori’s room, down her stairs, and out of her house, Sayori walking closely behind her.


	12. 𝄇

Natsuki and Sayori were sitting in the clubroom, with the lights turned off, with Natsuki’s backpack open as Natsuki tried to fish out a notebook from within it.

Sayori still had a haunted look on her face, and as Natsuki pulled out the notebook, Sayori’s eyes barely adjusted to glance at it. “What is that?”

Flipping it open for just a brief moment, Natsuki flashed one of the pages to Sayori. “I’ve been struggling to figure out what to say to Monika to get her to put an end to all of this, and come up with a new approach each cycle. I write down what I’m going to say in this notebook, and then, if it fails...” She then pulled out a thumb drive. “I use this to make sure the notebook keeps its contents into the next cycle.”

“You wrote a program?” Sayori’s eyes widened.

“Err...” Natsuki scratched the back of her head. “Not really? I mean, it runs on the computer, but it’s sort of… I don’t really understand it enough to explain it. It’s like, it opens up one of those old computer windows where it’s just a bunch of text and runs a command.”

“I didn’t know you knew how to do that kind of stuff.”

Natsuki grimaced. “I don’t. This is like three lines of code, and it took me like twenty cycles to figure out how to write it correctly.” She sighed. “When this is all over, I’m definitely sticking to poetry.”

Sayori nodded slowly. “So what do I need to do?”

“Remi is going to show up to the classroom in a little while.” Natsuki returned to grimacing. “He’s only… designed? Programmed? He―” Natsuki grinned. “I don’t know if he’s a robot or a cyborg or something else―he only knows to react to your absence, so I don’t know what he’ll do when he sees you. Probably just shut down or something. But if he doesn’t shut down, you need to keep him in the classroom.”

“How do I do that?”

Natsuki shrugged dismissively. “Kiss him? Fuck him? It doesn’t make a difference to me, just make sure he doesn’t leave.”

Sayori’s face turned a bright pink, though it wasn’t evident in the relative darkness of the classroom.

“If this doesn’t work, then...” Natsuki shook her head. “Well, it doesn’t matter for you. But if it does work, I’ll try to find you to make sure we all stay together, okay?”

Sayori nodded.

“Again: it’s not a big deal if you come find us, but Remi absolutely needs to stay in the classroom. If he finds Monika, it’s a guaranteed reset. So that’s why I’m telling you to stay here, with him.”

* * *

Natsuki was sitting with her back to the computer lab door, scribbling the last of her notes into her notebook, in today’s page, and then, resigned to the solution, she hid the notebook behind a nearby locker and opened the door to the computer lab, stepping inside.

Monika was sitting at a computer, furiously typing away, but upon seeing Natsuki enter the room, she jumped up, startled. “Natsuki?! What are you doing here??” She looked at the door. “How did you get in, the door was locked?”

Taking on a fake bored tone, Natsuki made a dismissive motion with her hand. “I broke the lock last Tuesday ahead of time.”

“I...” she shook her head. “Whatever. I can’t deal with this right now. Go back to the classroom, start getting to work on the setup for the culture festival.”

“Monika,” Natsuki said airily, “you and I both know the culture festival is never going to happen.”

Freezing in place, Monika began to regard Natsuki with an obvious look of suspicion. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Natsuki said, shrugging with her hands, “today ends when Remi finds Sayori hanging in her bedroom, right? The stuff having to do with the culture festival probably doesn’t even exist in this world.”

Monika’s eyes widened. “How do you know about any of that?”

“Okay.” Natsuki threw up her hands. “Every time I try to explain things to you, you just start panicking, so I’m just going to try laying everything out as well as I can. I know that we’re in some kind of time loop, and that you’re responsible for it. I don’t think you caused it, because you never seem to really have a grasp on everything, but either way, I don’t care. We’re in a time loop, Remi is a robot or something.”

Pursing her lips, Monika remained silent.

“Anyways,” Natsuki continued, “I think you already know about most of this, but like a hundred cycles ago you stopped retaining your memories across each loop, and I started retaining memories instead. I have no idea why. So every loop, I try to explain all of this to you, and you panic. Then something happens that causes the reset. Sometimes you do it because you think I’m going crazy and you just want to redo things, sometimes it happens because Remi shows up and it kicks us straight into the timeline where Sayori’s gone and Yuri’s like, horny and trying to rape Remi, and sometimes everything just blitzes out and we’re back at the start for no reason at all. So I’m here now, because even though you never seem to believe me, I’m pretty sure you’re the only one who can end all of this.”

Just as Natsuki finished her monologue, she spotted Yuri, hiding in the back of the room, curled up behind the massive pile of cans, watching the whole affair nervously.

“So?” Natsuki said, her mouth dry. “What do you think of all that?”

Monika sighed, and placed her hand over one of her eyes. “Natsuki… This is...” She sat back down and rested her other hand on top of the keyboard. “Insane.”

Natsuki rolled her eyes. “Well, geez, Monika, no fucking way! I had no idea this was insane! I mean, this is literally the second time _today_ someone has said that to me, but man, now that you’ve said it, I guess it’s really going to sink in this time!”

Narrowing her eyes, Monika retorted, “you don’t need to be rude.”

Natsuki threw up her hands apologetically. “I’m sorry, you’re right. I’m sorry.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Monika folded her hands together. “So you’re telling me that you’ve remembered like a hundred more resets of the game than I have.”

“Yeah, I―” Natsuki blinked. “Wait, what?”

“That’s what you said,” Monika responded, raising an eyebrow. “This game has repeated hundreds of extra times, according to you.”

Natsuki continued blinking. “… Game?”

Monika leaned forwards, a suspicious look creeping across her face. “Yeah. This is all a computer game.”

Placing her hands behind her head, Natsuki leaned back with a contemplative look on her face. “… Huh.”

“You didn’t know that?”

“I mean, I knew we were part of some kind of fake reality, but I’d worked out that it had to be some kind of Anime, given how all the artwork of us looked. But actually, a computer game makes a lot more sense, given how Remi keeps acting.”

“So you had no idea of this, yet you claim to have seen hundreds more resets than me,” Monika said, sighing.

Natsuki snapped, “well most of the time you refuse to explain anything!”

“Fair enough,” Monika said condescendingly. “So what else do you know? What other kinds of things did you see across these other timelines you’ve supposedly seen.”

“Oh for fuck’s...” Natsuki rubbed her eyes in frustration. “I’m not proving this to you, we’ve got bigger things to talk about.”

“No, we don’t.” Monika began typing on the keyboard.

“Hey!” Natsuki began to approach Monika. “What are you…!”

Without warning, Natsuki found herself running into an invisible wall and falling backwards, sprawled on the floor.

Monika glanced down at Natsuki. “Better hope Remi doesn’t show up, with your panties on display like that.”

Natsuki quickly covered herself up. “Shut up! What the hell are you doing?”

Sighing, Monika briefly lifted her hands from the keyboard. “So I don’t know how it happened, but you’ve got fake memories.”

“I already know that!” Natsuki said, “my manga is fake, my dad is fake, I know that―”

“No,” Monika said abruptly. “This right here. Your memories of the other timelines. Those are fake.”

“W-what??”

“There’s only been 8 cycles so far. I’ve been keeping track.”

“No, that’s…!” Natsuki groaned in frustration. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, you haven’t been retaining your memories for a long time! I think you were for awhile, but every time things reset, you’ve been losing your memories.”

Monika reached for the computer monitor and turned it around. “We’re only on cycle 8. Look.”

Natsuki shook her head. “That’s…” She blinked. “Wait, what year is that…?”

“You can’t trust it,” Monika said, turning the monitor back around. “This computer doesn’t have an external internet connection, so it doesn’t stay in sync.”

“And what was that about recycling?”

“I’m not waiting to see how the alternate timeline plays out,” Monika said, sighing. “You’re already too corrupted to be salvageable, and the game can’t handle your absence in that part of the cycle, so I’m just restarting the whole thing with cycle 9. I’m hoping it clears out the problems with your code.”

Natsuki’s eyes widened. “Wait, what?! No, stop!”

“I’ve already started it,” Monika said, looking at Natsuki coldly, “and I know you don’t know how to undo it. So it’s too late. You can’t―GHHK!”

Monika’s whole body suddenly lurched forwards as the blade of a knife protruded from her chest. It was at this moment that Monika realized that Natsuki wasn’t looking at her, but instead was looking slightly behind her. She turned, and saw that Yuri’s panicked face was staring at her in horror, and her hands were clutched around the handle of a large knife.

“Yuri… You…!” Monika rasped, before she fell forwards, collapsing on the ground.

Natsuki stared at Yuri in horror. “Yuri, what the fuck!”

“I… I...” Yuri let go of the knife, clutching her blood-stained hands on her face. “It seemed like she did something really bad, and you said to take her out if she tried to do anything dangerous, so…!”

“Yuri you… idiot! I meant, like, tackle her or something! I didn’t mean you should kill her!”

Yuri’s eyes widened in terror. “I’m sorry! I just… oh god, what have I done?!”

Natsuki waved her hands forwards, and found that the invisible wall was gone. “Alright, just… get out of the way. The damage is already done.” She grabbed the computer chair and sat down in front of the monitor.

“I killed her. I killed Monika, I…!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Natsuki said dismissively. “It’s not the first time you’ve done that. I’m just glad you didn’t use that knife on yourself.”

“How are you so calm???”

“Because if she already started the reset, then there’s nothing we can do. This cycle is already lost.”

Yuri continued to stand tensely, staring down at Monika, then at Natsuki, then back to Monika. “Did… Was she telling the truth? About the cycles?”

Natsuki scoffed. “She’s made that claim before. I wish I’d have connected the dots and figured out this was a game. I probably wouldn’t have fucked up this timeline if I’d have known that.”

Upon saying that, Natsuki took a moment to consider herself, then shook her head.

“…. nah, honestly, I already fucked it up by getting invited by Remi.”

“I mean,” Yuri said quietly, “for someone who has supposedly has seen all of this hundreds of times before, it really appears as though you are missing a lot of critical information.”

Natsuki bit her lip. “Alright. You’re not going to remember anyways, so I might as well confess. I… kind of sort of spent most of those cycles just messing around. Like, I spent two cycles figuring out that things were looping, then I spent like… a year just messing around. Like, I’d just walk into the room and, like, start making out with you or something.” She grinned sheepishly. “I really didn’t start trying to solve this thing until like twenty-five cycles ago. That’s why I don’t have an accurate count.”

Yuri stared at Natsuki, dumbfounded. “Natsuki, that is...”

“Insane, I know,” Natsuki said sardonically. “Yeah, just complete the trifecta.”

Yuri fidgeted in place. “So what do we do?”

Natsuki sighed. “Well,” she said, pulling out her thumb drive and inserting it into the computer, “I need to transfer my notebook to the next cycle.”

Yuri looked around the room. “Where did those cans come from?”

Natsuki shrugged. “So this room is like a special part of this ani―game,” she quickly corrected, “and it also preserves itself across loops. So every time Monika drinks a coffee and tosses the can behind her, the pile just gets larger. Sometimes I clean it, but the last couple dozen cycles I’ve been leaving it, hoping the evidence would tell her that she’s been forgetting cycles.” She shook her head. “It… doesn’t appear to be working.”

“Wait...” Yuri flushed. “You said you would sometimes make out with me.”

“Yup!”

“W-why??”

“Because the only boy in this world is basically just a homunculus, and of the three girls here, you’re the hottest.”

“O-oh.”

Natsuki removed the thumb drive. “Alright, that should be enough. Now just to wait until the reset finally―”

* * *

“―occurs, and…. Oh.”

Natsuki was awake in her bedroom, shortly before midnight, on Monday morning, wearing her pajamas.

Sighing, Natsuki covered herself up. And, in the darkness of her room, she muttered, “whelp. Here we go again.”


End file.
